The Family Next Door

We all watched and enjoyed the ABC adaptation of Sally Hepworth's novel The Family Next Door, and younger daughter bought the book as her next tram read. It was interesting to compare the two versions of the story; perhaps it's format bias, but I think the drama worked slightly better in the TV series. A whole new subplot (and family) was added; two subplots were merged; and the emphasis of the narrative was heavily weighted toward the missing child thread, while in the book, the secret difficulties of each family were given roughly equal weight. On TV, the setting was altered to become a seaside town rather than a city suburb, although confusingly, the beach scenes were actually filmed in the suburbs where they were originally set in the novel (Sandringham, Black Rock -- I only know this because my husband grew up there).

In all senses, The Family Next Door would make a perfect beach read -- absorbing without being too demanding, eminently readable -- and it made a perfect basis for a TV adaptation. Success all round. 

First Knowledges: Ceremony

 The latest volume in the wonderful First Knowledges series is Ceremony: All Our Yesterdays for Today by Wesley Enoch and Georgia Curran. It's fitting to have a male and female co-author, because ceremonies can differ for different genders and purposes. Enoch and Curran distinguish between public-facing ceremonies, shared and open to all, like Welcomes to Country and funeral rituals, and inward-directed ceremony, restricted to certain people and sacred in intent.

Enoch makes the excellent point that it would be preferable to support and celebrate the continuing and evolving practice of actually holding ceremony, rather than giving priority to recording performances and collecting artefacts for a static, frozen archive (though I can see the importance of that, too). Ceremony is a living, ephemeral practice, constantly repeated and renewed through performance, and as such, it's difficult for Western cultures, so centred on knowledge through texts and material objects, to value it appropriately.

As always, this First Knowledges volume contains much food for thought and insight into First Nations history and culture (including a note at the front of the book that points out that some Aboriginal people dislike the term 'First Nations' which has its origin in North America. Oh, dear! I think I'll keep using it, though, even though I appreciate that 'nations' is probably not the best descriptor of Australian Indigenous peoples.) The next title will be Politics -- should be an interesting and maybe confronting read!

The Unsought Farm

The Unsought Farm, Monica Edwards' 1954 memoir about her life on Punch Bowl Farm, was a little birthday treat for myself. I've never read the series of young adult fiction she wrote about Punchbowl Farm, but apparently, like her previous Romney Marsh books (which I love), they have one foot in fact and the other in fiction, drawing on real experiences and her own children to create the adventures of the Thornton family.

Almost without intending to, Edwards successfully bid for the property at auction and then had to face the reality of herself and her husband Bill becoming farmers. After the war (I'm not sure if this is still the case), it was not legal to own arable land without actually farming it, so they gradually built up to owning a Jersey herd and sowing crops, as well as improving the ancient farmhouse. Bill seems to have worked miracles, uncovering inglenook fireplaces, creating bathrooms out of thin air, punching windows into dark rooms, demolishing dangerous chimneys and more. Edwards writes about their trials and tribulations, especially the activities of their many animals (including four Siamese cats), with her trademark warmth and understated humour.

The Unsought Farm is a lovely book. The Edwards stayed at the farm until 1968, when they retired to a nearby cottage, and Punch Bowl Farm was still an active farm well into the 1990s. It's a glimpse into a way of agricultural small-holding life that has become vanishing rare, so its triumphs are tinged with melancholy for a modern reader. In its own way, it's as much of a fantasy story now as any of Edwards' beloved novels.
 

The Ladies Road Guide to Utter Ruin

First, my only niggle -- where is the apostrophe in the title of this book? It seems to have been shaken loose and lost in the tumult of events. But that quibble aside, it was an absolute delight to rejoin the company of adventurous Regency sisters, Augusta and Julia, and their rogue love interests, Lord Evan (sometime highwayman) and Mr Kent (proto-police officer). The sisters are sheltering the noble lady they rescued from a madhouse in the first book, but her brother is hot on her trail, and they are also desperate to get to the bottom of the duel that cost Lord Evan his freedom and his reputation.

The pace of The Ladies['] Guide to Utter Ruin never slackens for an instant as Augusta dons disguises, penetrates a hellish private gentleman's club, tears about on horseback and in racing carriages, tells outrageous lies and begs favours from Beau Brummell, no less. There are sobering reminders of just how much power men hold over women at this time (hint: it's total), but also a cute moment where Gus finds time to read a recent novel starring another pair of sisters (one with sense and one with sensibility).

Thrillingly, Utter Ruin ends with Augusta and companions about to embark on their most challenging quest yet, some kind of Scarlet Pimpernel-ish rescue mission into revolutionary France. I can hardly wait.
 

How to Survive 1985

As you know, I'm a sucker for a time slip story and How to Survive 1985 is right up my alley. Shannon goes into a Sydney cinema in 2025 and emerges into 1985. This is not her first supernatural experience, so she's not as phased as you might expect. She quickly comes up with a plan: she'll track down her mum, who is sixteen years old in this world. This idea works surprisingly well, and her mum becomes an ally in Shannon's quest to find her other friends (who were all part of her previous adventure).

Shannon explains in some detail what happened to her and her friends in the book before this one, Royals, where they were all trapped in a time loop inside a shopping centre. That time, the earth seemed to be trying to teach them something about the perils of consumerism, but this time round the lesson is a little more vague -- something about climate change, something about plastic, something about caring for the planet? There are plenty of reflections about how much the world has changed (or not) in the last forty years, but How To Survive 1985 keeps a light, pacy touch which makes it a hugely enjoyable adventure.

I ended up really loving this novel. It's not long, and it never flags, and it's made me hungry to track down the gang's prior magical adventure, which annoyingly is not available at my local library. I hope Shannon, James, Akira and the others have more strange experiences in store.
 

The Deadly Dispute

We are now up to number three in Amanda Hampson's Tea Ladies mysteries. The Deadly Dispute takes us up to 1967 and modernity is definitely encroaching on the tea ladies' world. Replaced by a coffee machine, Hazel has been unemployed for eighteen months when she's offered a job with a trade union; Irene has given up serving tea altogether and is now a cleaner at a brothel. Naive Betty is exposed to free love, drugs and feminism when she makes friends with a young woman at her clothing factory. Fourth member of the gang, Merl, is somewhat sidelined in this story after she takes offence at the decisions of the Tea Lady association.

But the real action is down at the docks, where Hazel soon finds herself up to her neck in trouble and smuggled Krugerrands. I was reminded that these novels take place in the same locale as Ruth Park's Harp in the South books, albeit somewhat later. Hampson does an excellent job of evoking 1960s Sydney and the social and political currents of the time, as well as an engaging crime story which proves that middle aged ladies can be effective action heroines -- Betty has no need to mourn for her wasted youth.

I'm really enjoying this series and while I'm not sure if there are further adventures in store for the intrepid tea ladies, I certainly hope that they don't hang up their pinnies any time soon.
 

My Year Without Matches

I found Australian Claire Dunn's memoir, My Year Without Matches, on the shelves of the Athenaeum and the subtitle intrigued me: Escaping the city in search of the wild. 'The wild' is something I find powerfully attractive on the page -- in real life, not so much. Dunn herself was a burned-out wilderness and conservation activist when she committed to spend twelve months on a kind of wilderness retreat, a bit like Alone but with more supports in place, and a group of five others taking their own journeys alongside.

As any viewer of Alone will already know, living in the bush invariably becomes as much an inner quest as a physical adventure. At first Dunn struggles with the basics of building a shelter and especially wrestles with trying to make fire without matches (hence the title), to the point where she had blood blisters on both palms from rubbing futilely at the hand drill. She's also driven by mental demons, a constant fear of not 'doing it properly,' self-doubt and existential angst. It's these more spiritual struggles that dominate toward the end of the book, when Dunn has relaxed into the company of insects and snakes, not washing her hair, and sleeping on the ground. More problematic are her fluctuating relationships with the other participants on the course.

My Year Without Matches is a highly readable, relatable account of a spiritual quest that ultimately comes to rest in a realisation that simply being is enough. Fittingly, Dunn now runs nature reconnection retreats of her own. I love the idea of living so close to nature (Dunn vows to only eat meat she's caught and killed herself, and sticks to it) but I know the reality would defeat me, probably on the first night. The next best thing is reading about it.
 

Pureheart

Disclaimer: Cassandra Golds and I are Facebook friends, and we share very similar tastes in reading. Pureheart is a beautiful, poetic fable about love, power and grief, a tight struggle between a girl, her grandmother, and the boy who loves her (and whom she loves).

The main character is called Deirdre, the same name as the supernaturally sensitive little sister in Nicholas Stuart Gray's classic Down in the Cellar, and Pureheart shares the same eerie atmosphere as Gray's book (Golds specifically refers to Gray in her acknowledgements, so I know I'm not drawing a long bow here). 

Pureheart is not a realist story; Deirdre and Gal wander the rooms and hallways of Corbenic, part block of flats, part fairytale castle, part internal world of Deirdre's grandmother. This is a novel that takes place in several different realms, and while it might confuse some young readers, there will be a subset of children who will respond eagerly to its haunting, other-worldly spirit.

I loved it. 

The Royal Butler

Grant Harrold's new book, The Royal Butler, was a birthday present from my daughter, riding on the coat-tails of The Residence which we both enjoyed so much. Not surprisingly, Harrold is a big fan of the monarchy, and his obsession with queens and castles began when he was a small child. Living with dyslexia, Harrold didn't do well at school, but that didn't deter him from writing to lots of people (aristocrats) and asking for work. Before long he'd landed a job in a grand house, one thing led to another, and he ended up working for many years as butler to Princes Charles (now the King) at his country estate at Highgrove. He was made redundant in the lead up to Charles taking the throne, but has successfully parlayed his experience into an etiquette school and a career in media commentary.

There is quite a bit of royal gossip here, a peek into the private lives of princes and monarchs (they're just like us! Only -- special) and fascinating detail about how these grand households operate. The sheer number of staff required to wait on a small family, or even just a couple, is mind-boggling. Harrold keeps pinching himself. Am I really sitting on the stairs of an ancient palace? Am I really dancing with the Queen herself at a workplace party? Did Prince Philip really just nod in my direction? Harrold freely admits this was his dream job, and he is thrilled for just about every minute of it.

There is an uneasy tightrope being walked here, between marvelling at how ordinary and friendly and approachable the royals can be, and the feeling of breathless reverence that Harrold still cherishes toward them. Harrold himself has a sweet, naive-seeming charm, but if the amounts of money spent on royalty make you feel queasy, maybe don't read this book.

 

The Westing Game

Ellen Raskin's 1978 middle grade mystery The Westing Game is one of those books that completely slipped under my radar -- as it was published just before I finished primary school, I think I just missed falling into the right demographic at the time, and remained blissfully ignorant of it thereafter. But with over 200,000 ratings on Goodreads, it's clear that other people did manage to find it!

The Westing Game reminded me of how much I adored Encyclopedia Brown and Nancy Drew as a young reader, and I'm sure I would have lapped this up. Sixteen strangers are drawn together to solve the mystery in Sam Westing's will; how are the heirs connected to Sam, and how do the clues fit together to expose his murderer? The heirs are paired together in seemingly unlikely duos, but it turns out that each has something to offer the other. For me, there was more satisfaction in seeing the heirs help each other than in the eventual solution of the mystery.

The Westing Game is a slim novel (another one borrowed from my book group friend, Sian) and I raced through it. It's supremely entertaining, the diverse characters each has an unexpected side, although they're sketched broadly, and the mystery is just complicated enough to be intriguing. And shin-kicking Turtle Wexler is a heroine to love.
 

Some Tame Gazelle; Excellent Women; Jane and Prudence

I've saved the three novels in this Barbara Pym omnibus to talk about together, because in some ways they are very similar. Some Tame Gazelle, Excellent Women and Jane and Prudence were all published in the early 1950s, all centring on the lives of English middle class women who are alike in background, if not temperament: they are all highly educated, conversant with poetry and literature, intelligent and observant. However, most of them don't really work (if they're married), or if they do, their jobs are menial and unfulfilling (Prudence works in a vague capacity for a professor, who apparently needs a staff of SIX to function; Mildred volunteers in a charity for distressed gentlewomen). In fact, almost all Pym's characters could be described as distressed gentlewomen in one way or another. They might be disappointed in love, or relatively calmly nursing a hopeless passion for some unattainable man; they might be busy with the local church (the church looms hugely in all their lives), or berate themselves for being useless at such practical duties, like Jane, a vicar's wife. Their lives unfold at a gentle pace. A great event might be going to an anthropology lecture, or a mild misunderstanding at a parish meeting.

This is the milieu of Miss Marple and St Mary Mead, but without the intrusion of violent crime, and most of these women seem destined for a Miss Marple-ish fate -- overlooked, underappreciated, seen as irrelevant, their talents wasted, even their capacity for love under-utilised. It all sounds very depressing and dull -- and yet Barbara Pym's novels are anything but. This omnibus is nearly 700 pages long and whenever I put it down, I couldn't wait to get back to it.

Somehow these women's lives are so absorbing, so slyly funny and subtly poignant, I quickly became addicted. I also enjoyed the cameos or passing references to characters from different books, and I see that Miss Doggett and Jessie Morrow from Jane and Prudence also star in Crampton Hodnet, which is still on my TBR pile. There is also penetrating social commentary here, disguised as flippant dialogue or inner musings. I am so thrilled to have discovered a new author, and one with a full backlist to explore. Thank you, Susan Green, for the recommendation.

Bookish

I knew that Lucy Mangan and I were going to get along as soon as she professed her love for Antonia Forest, and so it proved. I wolfed down her memoir of childhood reading, Bookworm (now, alas, interred inside my deceased Kindle), ticking off all the books that we had in common.

There were not quite so many mutual ticks in this sequel, Bookish, which sweeps across Mangan's reading through high school, university, first job, falling in love, early motherhood, and produces books suitable to each stage of life. I'm not sure which is more satisfying, realising that we both adore the same books (I Capture the Castle, The Long Winter (with caveats), Jane Austen) or grabbing a notebook to write down the books and authors that she loves that I haven't discovered yet (Norah Lofts? The Tenant of Wildfell Hall?) or even bookshops that I hope to visit one day (The Haunted Bookshop in Cambridge is a whole shop devoted to second hand children's books!!!)

We don't agree about absolutely everything (eg she liked The Da Vinci Code, but can't read any history escept medieval and Tudors, and is bored by WWII) but it would be so boring if we were in total concord. Mangan writes with such joy and verve about the love of books and the delights of acquisition -- she is especially eloquent about the pleasures of second hand book browsing -- and she is happily candid about being an introvert and preferring books to people. I could relate to her complaint about pandemic lockdowns, not that she was too isolated from other people, but that she wasn't isolated enough. Bookish is a delicious delight, and I'm sure Lucy Mangan and I would be friends, if we could tear ourselves away from reading long enough to have a conversation.
 

The Doll Twin

Borrowed from my book group friend, Sian, Janine Beacham's The Doll Twin is Gothic horror for middle grade readers. It begins with an orphan, Una, who seems never likely to be adopted from the chilly orphanage. When a pair of prospective parents arrive, warm and welcoming, she is overjoyed. However, her new home proves to be a spooky mansion, filled with strange mechanical contrivances left behind by the former owner, a mysterious doll maker. And then the creepiest discovery of all: a life sized doll, an Animated Curiosity, who looks exactly like Una herself.

The Doll Twin is deliciously creepy and has some important things to say about not judging by appearances, but it was sadly marred by some lapses in editing, such as when the doll, Ani, expresses her love for the Iron-Hearted Sea on one page, then a couple of pages later exclaims, 'The Iron-Hearted Sea? Is that its name?' I'm noticing more and more sloppiness creeping into recently published books like this, and I understand that publishers and editors are increasingly under-resourced and over-worked, and that mistakes are going to happen. But it really does spoil the reading experience, for me at least, and The Doll Twin deserved better, because it is a lot of fun.

 

Tilda Is Visible

Jane Tara's novel Tilda is Visible has a cracking premise. Middle aged and older women often complain about feeling invisible; what if invisibility was a real, physical condition?

'I'm disappearing?'

'We don't use that term anymore. Invisibility advocates are very much against it. Women who suffer from invisibility don't literally disappear. You may be invisible, but you're certainly not disappearing. There's a difference.'

Tilda is fifty two, her unsatisfactory marriage has ended and she's feeling unfulfilled in her business life. To her horror, she finds that bits of her are vanishing -- first a finger, then an ear, a nose. She joins a support group where she meets women who have become completely invisible. And everyone tells her there is no cure. What to do?

Well, spoiler alert, Tilda does find ways to fight back and restore her visibility, which involve unpacking past trauma, lots of supportive female friendships, hefty doses of meditation, rewriting her mental scripts, and photography, as well as meeting a lovely guy (who happens to be blind). However, this is very much a story of self-rescue, and while there are lots of funny moments early on, the mood shifts to a more earnest exploration of female sense of self, domestic abuse and the social irrelevance of older women.

Tilda Is Visible would be a great choice for book clubs, and there's even a handy list of questions at the back to make the discussion easier.
 

The Residence

The Residence: Inside the Private World of the White House by Kate Andersen Brower was such a fun, fascinating read! I bought this book for my younger daughter after we both watched the Netflix murder mystery, The Residence, partly based on Brower's book (the Netflix show was also a fun, fascinating experience: recommended, with a particular shout-out to the bonus Australian content!)

No murder mysteries here, unless you count the Kennedy assassination (which of course was not fun at all). But The Residence offers a glimpse inside the institution of the heart of the White House, the second and third floors where the President and his family live, and the hidden warren of workrooms, kitchens, stores and offices where the staff mostly invisibly carry out their duties. Presidential families come and go, but the staff stay on, often for decades, more loyal to the job than to the current incumbent.

There are loads of juicy anecdotes here, some of which made their way (suitably disguised) into the Netflix series (like LBJ's weird obsession with his shower). Some Presidents and their spouses come out of the staff accounts better than others. The senior Bushes were beloved for their relaxed, friendly attitude; LBJ was, frankly, a psycho; the Clintons, not surprisingly, had a tense, paranoid relationship, though Chelsea was unfailingly sweet. Nancy Reagan is not reported on well. One shudders to think what the Trumps would be like to live with... (The Residence stops near the end of the Obamas' tenure.)

One aspect of The Residence that left me slightly uneasy is the racial element of the staff hierarchy. The maids and butlers are overwhelmingly people of colour; but the top chefs, ushers, housekeepers etc tend to be white. I don't know if anything's changed since 2015, and Brower is open about discussing the history of the staff hiring policy, but it still left me with a faint unpleasant taste in the mouth.

I don't know why I'm so interested in stories about servants, but The Residence was a great addition to my collection, with an intriguing American twist.

England Through Colonial Eyes in Twentieth Century Fiction

I'm a little embarrassed to admit that I bit off more than I could chew with this book! I couldn't resist the title, but when it arrived from Brotherhood Books, I realised that it was a very scholarly collection of essays from three La Trobe University History and English academics: Ann Blake, Leela Gandhi and Sue Thomas. I did my best to keep up, but some of the chapters defeated me.

Part 1 consisted of some general essays, and Part 2 looked at several individual authors of colonial origins who had 'returned' to England and explored the 'mother country' in their fiction. I was familiar with Katherine Mansfield (NZ) and Christina Stead (Australia), less so with Jean Rhys (the Caribbean). I have read a bit of Doris Lessing, but I think I was too young for The Golden Notebook; The Good Terrorist did leave a deep impression on me. I have to confess that I've never had much more than a dutiful interest in VS Naipaul and Salman Rushdie, and I struggled with their chapters. I've never heard of Nigerian-born Buchi Emecheta, but I'm definitely intrigued now, and likewise David Dabydeen is a new author to me.

I'm still interested in the subject of authors bringing their various colonial and post-colonial perspectives to the colonising country -- most of them are at best ambivalent, some downright scathing -- but perhaps reading their novels might be a better place for me to start.

More Than We Can Tell

 

I borrowed Brigid Kemmerer's More Than We Can Tell because it includes a teenager who makes her own online game, but unlike Slay, the online world plays only a relatively minor role in this story. This novel is a kind of sequel to Letters to the Lost, and the characters of Juliet and Declan reappear here. However, the novel centres on a different pair: reclusive, damaged Rev (aka the Grim Reaper, because he's always shrouded in a hoodie) and Emma, torn between her distracted computer geek father and her critical, driven doctor mother.

Emma's game features because she's being harassed by a player called Nightmare; she's also befriended by a supportive player called Ethan (we never discover if they are, in fact, the same person). Her parents' marriage is dissolving, and in the midst of all this, she strikes up a tentative friendship with 'weirdo' Rev. We learn that Rev has many reasons to be weird, mostly connected with his estranged, abusive father. These two defensive characters have to overcome their inner demons to help each other.

I quickly became hooked by More Than We Can Tell. It's a very YA novel; especially early in the book, I felt like shaking both Rev and Emma and urging them to just tell their parents how they were feeling -- it would have saved a lot of drama! But I can imagine adolescent readers gobbling up this tortured romance with a spoon. 

I think I was most horrified to learn about Lucky Charms, allegedly a breakfast cereal, eaten by Rev and his foster brother, which consists of MARSHMALLOWS and 'frosted oats.' It sounds horrific, and definitely not something anyone should eat for breakfast.

The Complete Idiot's Guide to the World of Narnia

  

You might have noticed that I'm a sucker for books about Narnia Michael Ward's Planet Narnia is still my favourite). I need to be careful, though, because particularly the American guides to Narnia tend to come from an overtly Christian standpoint and are only really interested in showing how Lewis used the Chronicles to retell a Christian story. In my view, there is more to Narnia than that, and while it's not possible to completely disentangle Lewis's Christian message from the stories, I don't agree that they function solely as evangelical propaganda.

All of which is a long-winded way of saying that James S. Bell Jr and Cheryl Dunlop's The Complete Idiot's Guide to the World of Narnia is strongly weighted towards the Christian angle. They pull in Bible quotes at every opportunity and stress the parallels between Aslan and Jesus. I noticed that they skimmed over certain aspects of Lewis's biography: Mrs Moore doesn't rate a single mention. The pitch of the book is uncertain. Sometimes it seems to be directed at child readers of the Chronicles, sometimes at adults. (The authors recommend reading the books aloud, 'even if you don't have a child,' so perhaps the primary audience is grown up!)

This is a comprehensive guide to Narnia, examining the literary and mythological influences on each book (though always stressing the Biblical), though there's a bit more emphasis on the 'morals' of the stories than I'd like. Picking out explicit moral lessons is a sure way to kill the magic of a book. Maybe this guide might be most useful to a first time visitor to the Narnia universe.

The Burrow

I had to wait a long time to borrow Melanie Cheng's The Burrow from the local library. It's a small and exquisitely formed novel, about a small group of people (and one rabbit): Jin and Amy, their ten year old daughter Lucie, and Amy's mother, Pauline, who is forced to move in with the family after breaking her wrist. They are all negotiating the death of baby Ruby, three years before, and dealing with Melbourne Covid lockdowns.

Ironically, when The Burrow finally became available, I wasn't sure if it was the right time for me to read it. My own elderly mother recently broke her wrist, and my family is dealing with the recent death of a beloved pet. When I read about Lucie adopting a fragile mini-lop rabbit (yes, we've had rabbits, too), my heart sank. Could I handle a novel about grief and loss, especially one that was so intimately relatable?

But The Burrow is so gentle, so delicate, it's like softly pressing a wound to see how much it hurts. Though the book opens with everyone locked inside their own suffering, as the story unfolds, connections are made and the world begins to open up again. This is a beautiful miniature novel, and though it didn't take long to read, it was worth the long wait.
 

Voices From a Lost World

I had a feeling I'd read this book before! Searching my blog reveals that I bought Jan Roberts' Voices From a Lost World for the first time from the local library book sale in 2010 -- and I've now bought it again from Brotherhood Books at four times the price (still cheap). I can't find it on my shelves, though; perhaps it's in the box of PNG resources in the attic that I stashed there after I finished writing New Guinea Moon.

ANYWAY it's still a fascinating book. Published in 1996, it features interviews and stories from Australian women and children who lived in Papua New Guinea before the outbreak of WWII. Though some returned to live there after the fighting, a certain way of life vanished forever. In some ways it was a very hard life -- little medical care, isolation, few mod cons, tinned food, malaria and blackwater fever. In some ways it was incredibly privileged, compared with the lives of the local people. Despite the colonial exploitation, close personal relationships did form between individual families and their house staff, the cooks and 'boys' and nannies, and most white children of the era recalled a carefree and happy childhood.

Whether government administrators, gold prospectors, traders or hotel owners, the colonial life came to an abrupt end with the invasion of the Japanese. All white women and children were swiftly evacuated, but most of the men remained behind, many losing their lives in the sinking of the prisoner ship Montevideo Maru, a tragedy communicated to their families only long after the event.

Voices From a Lost World will go on my bookshelf and I'll try not to lose it this time (and I'll try not to buy it all over again).

The Skin I'm In

The Skin I'm In is the debut novel of First Nations comedian Steph Tisdell, and it's the final shortlisted book on the CBCA Notables list. I'm disappointed that it didn't take out the top gong, because I really enjoyed it. Tisdell is only thirty and she's kept in close touch with all those big adolescent feelings; her protagonist Layla is warm and funny and excellent company, even when she's going through gut-wrenching experiences.

Layla is pretty much the only Indigenous student at her high school, and she's always been a top pupil, her eyes set firmly on university, a law degree, and changing the world. But her final year holds a few unexpected road bumps. Her cousin Marley comes to live with the family, and he's had a rough childhood. Layla loses her best friend to another girl, and studying Australian history brings up uncomfortable questions about her identity and the way her fellow students and even the teachers look at her. Then, as if she didn't have enough distractions, she falls in love...

There is a lot of tough material here: Layla reflects on historic trauma and disadvantage, Marley's mother is a drug addict, there is a suicide attempt, Layla's boyfriend's has an unstable and abusive home life. But Layla is such an engaging character that we are happy to follow her anywhere. It's not so much that she's laugh out loud funny, but she's thoughtful and entertaining and candid. The Skin I'm In is my favourite of the CBCA shortlist, in case you hadn't guessed.
 

The Harp in the South

I was inspired to go back to Ruth Park's Harp in the South novels after reading her autobiographies. I read the final volume, Poor Man's Orange, years ago for school, but I wasn't even aware that Park had written a prequel, Missus, in the 1980s. So I pounced on this omnibus edition when I found it at the Athenaeum.

Well, I tried Missus, but it wasn't for me. Somehow I couldn't connect with the characters and the story seemed forced. But once I plunged into The Harp in the South, all was forgiven. Mumma and Hughie, Dolour and Roie, leapt off the page in their brave struggles with poverty and bad luck. I can see why The Harp in the South caused such controversy when it was first published, with people protesting that such scenes of deprivation couldn't be true. But Park and her husband had themselves lived in the streets of Surry Hills and witnessed the lives of people like the Darcys firsthand. 

There is much humour and joy in this novel, but Park doesn't shy away from either the everyday sufferings like bedbugs, rats, ragged clothes and shared beds, or the grimmer realities of alcoholism, violence, and back street abortion. (The latter was probably the true source of the outrage at the time.) I remember being very confused by Roie's name when I first encountered it -- was it a fancy way of spelling Roy? Eventually I realised it was short for Rowena. I'd also forgotten, or never realised, that Charlie, Roie's eventual husband, has Aboriginal heritage, though he is disconnected from his people. It'll be interesting to see how much of Poor Man's Orange, if anything, has stuck since Year 9 English!
 

28

Helen Garner's The Season is a book about football written from the outside looking in, by a loving grandmother witnessing awkward moments at training, courage and vulnerability on the field. In contrast, Brandon Jack's memoir, 28, is written from the inside of an AFL club, the experience so intense that there is no outside world.

Brandon Jack, son of rugby great Garry and brother of star AFL player Kieran, spent several years on the Sydney Swans list without ever quite breaking into the regular side. 28 refers to the number of senior games he ended up playing; often he served as an emergency, floating uncomfortably between seniors and reserves. No matter how manically he trained, how much self-punishment he meted out, he could never quite lift himself over that invisible line. For the last couple of years, he lost interest in the game, faking an injury to get out of playing seniors, leading the drinking games and mindless destruction of his fellow fringe players (I expect his recently released novel Pissants will cover these activities in more detail).

There is insight in Jack's story, and he writes with eloquence about trying to belong in a sporting team without losing his sense of self, but the largest pain here, and one he doesn't examine too closely, lies in his family. Jack and his parents were estranged for years (though I gather they have a better relationship now), but we only get glimpses of the casual brutality of his father's expectations and the effect they must have had on Jack and his two brothers. The brothers' decision to change codes from rugby to AFL was a dreadful blow to their father; not wanting to play football at all was unthinkable. But Brandon's true passions are music and writing, not sport.

28 is subtitled A Memoir of Football, Addiction, Art, Masculinity and Love. That's a lot to bite off, and perhaps it's no wonder that Jack can't fully chew the whole mouthful. Still, this is a remarkably candid and painful memoir and well worth a read.

The Sweetness Between Us

The Sweetness Between Us by Sarah Winifred Searle, the next title on the Notables list, surprised me in several different ways. First, it's a graphic novel -- the only one on the list, as far as I recall -- which meant I could race through it in a single sitting. Second, it's set in the US (at least, a parallel universe US with supernatural elements). The author is an American now living in Perth, but more than a little homesick. Third surprise: vampires! They appeared just as I thought I was settling into a conventional high school relationship story. Fourth surprise: one of the main characters, Perley, turned out to be a boy, though I had mentally coded him firmly as a girl for quite a while. My bad.

I enjoyed the twist on high school odd couple romance. Amandine, 'turned' into a vampire after a near-fatal accident, is still trying to come to terms with her new identity, as is Perley, who has recently been diagnosed with diabetes, something that creates inconvenience but also huge financial difficulties for his family (this is one issue that I assume wouldn't arise with such sharpness if the story was set in Australia). Happily, Amandine can save Perley some cash on testing strips by tasting his blood sugar levels, while that little bit of real human blood also gives vegan Amandine benefits in energy and health. However, both characters need to separate for a while and explore their identities independently before they can truly be together.

The Sweetness Between Us is, appropriately, a sweet and thoughtful story with plenty of space for diverse identities of all kinds, and kicking back against all kinds of stereotypes.

My Brother, Finch

Continuing my exploration of CBCA Notable books, next comes My Brother, Finch by multi-award winning author Kate Gordon. Initially I was put off by this bleak brown cover; then I was put off by the peculiar formatting of the text, with line breaks between each paragraph. This is a very sad little book, focused on twelve year old Wren, whose brother Finch vanished three years ago on a family excursion, along with another young girl, Ava. Wren's family is shattered; her mother has thrown herself into investigation, her father is deeply depressed, Wren's former friends have drifted away. But when eccentric Freddie appears, it seems that she and Wren might become friends -- do they have more in common than Wren realises?

My Brother, Finch is a beautifully written, poetic book about grief and loss, and the particular pain of open-ended anguish that attaches to 'missing.' There is no happy ending here, though there is some light in the darkness. I've read reviews from adult readers who found it profoundly moving and helpful, but I suspect it might be a book that speaks to adult readers more easily than young ones. I hope that anyone who needs it, young or older, finds this book and loves it.
 

The Marches

As a big fan of Rory Stewart on the UK politics podcast, The Rest is Politics, I swooped on The Marches when it turned up in a street library. The subtitle, Border Walks With My Father, is a bit misleading: in the first section, Rory walks along Hadrian's Wall while his 94 year old father takes a car and meets him at intervals for a meal and a chat; in the second section, Rory takes a much longer walk through the country on either side of the Scotland/England border, trying to discern whether there is a distinct 'border' identity, and how much people there are influenced by national identity imposed by being on either side of the line (in fish and chip shops, the favoured fish switches abruptly from cod to haddock!) This time, Stewart senior is only present in daily ruminative emails.

I found the final section of The Marches the most moving. It's a detailed account of Brian Stewart's death and funeral, and it manages to sum up and complete the rather muddled previous sections, where Rory in fact fails to find the 'border identity' or sense of local history that he's seeking. He contrasts his conversations with the Scots and English of this area with his previous walks through countries like Afghanistan, where each village along the way has a fierce and distinct individual history and identity (maybe too fierce). 

I don't always agree with Rory -- he's hugely sceptical about rewilding, for example, and much prefers cows -- but he is always stimulating and congenial company, and his close relationship with his father is really touching.
 

Wolf in White Van

I borrowed John Darnielle's debut novel, Wolf in White Van, knowing absolutely nothing about it, because it's partly about role-playing games (more on that later, perhaps). It's not the kind of novel that I normally read, which as a dedicated follower of my blog, you already know tend to be cosy crime or gentle family dramas. Wolf in White Van is a young man's novel, a disturbing story of a, well, a young man who has suffered some kind of devastating 'accident' and now lives with horrifying injuries, running a role-playing game by correspondence. Something has gone terribly wrong with two of the players in this game, and as we slowly circle around those events back toward Sean's own 'accident,' the spiral tightens around a single life-changing decision.

The book is structured non-chronologically, which some readers have found challenging, but it's like peeling back an onion to the core of Sean's soul. This is a novel about choices -- the role-playing game that Sean has created demands players choose between four possible actions at the end of each turn, though none lead to consequences as brutal as Sean's real life action. This is a haunting novel about darkness, disconnection and alienation, which will stay with me for a long time.

John Darnielle is a novelist and musician. I suspect his music might be a bit too dark for me, and I'm not sure if I'm brave enough to approach his other novels, but I'm really glad I read this one.

The Diary of a Nobody

After listening to an episode of the Secret Life of Books podcast, I remembered how much I'd enjoyed reading George and Weedon Grossmith's The Diary of a Nobody while I was at school, and in a fit of nostalgia, borrowed it from the local library. I was quite surprised they had it, as they turn over their catalogue pretty fast, and Diary was first published in 1892.

SLOB alerted me to the class dimensions of the hunour -- I don't think I grasped, as a fourteen year old, that we were supposed to be laughing at the small pretensions and anxious respectability of the lower-middle class Pooters, as well as Charles' minor mishaps (painting the bath red) and feeble Dad jokes (you are talking a lot of dry rot yourself!). And I can't agree with Evelyn Waugh, who apparently described it as 'the funniest book in the world.' But I very much appreciated spending time in the Pooters' suburban world, trundling along in their comfortable social groove. It was extraordinary how relatable some of their problems still are: worrying about what to wear to a special event, fretting over their twenty year old son's life choices, getting in a huff over an offensive remark.

Most of all, I enjoyed this quiet celebration of modest lives. Pooter takes a refreshing pride in his lack of ambition, his desire to do his duty and keep his head down, and while I'm not sure if we are supposed to admire his humility and low-key virtues of fidelity and honesty, I can't help cheering for him and his 'dear Carrie.'
 

The Star of Kazan

I think I've now read just about all of Eva Ibbotson's books, but The Star of Kazan is a particularly good example of her formula. Reading an Ibbotson book is like sinking into a warm, fragrant bath; it's wonderful comfort reading. The Star of Kazan features an orphan girl (as usual, kind, generous and good at cooking!) who is unexpectedly whisked away from her close community in Vienna by a noblewoman claiming to be her long lost mother. The twist is that, while Annika's Viennese 'family' was warm, happy and comfortable, the grand household at Sittal with the von Tannenburgs is cold, miserable and poverty stricken. But wait! Some good fortune comes Edeltraut's way... but is it connected with Annika?

There is the usual cast of kind, capable boys, a courageous horse, some gypsies, a loyal bookish friend, delicious food, a cruel boarding school, missing jewels, and generous dollops of humour and pathos before everything comes right in the end. I can't believe I lasted so long without being exposed to Eva Ibbotson's work; it is so delightful. I would class The Star of Kazan as a children's book. Though some of her other novels straddle the line between young adult and adult, this one is perfectly safe (apart from one reference to suicide).
 

Angel with Two Faces

Angel With Two Faces, volume two in Nicola Upson's Josephine Tey murder mystery series sees Tey staying in Cornwall to write a new novel, at the childhood home of her closest friends, Ronnie and Lettice Motley, and their police detective cousin, Archie Penrose. Soon they are all deeply entangled in local secrets: the unexpected death of a young man which has left his two sisters bereft, and then the murder of a curate who apparently knew more than he should.

The Penrose estate, Loe Pool and the amazing clifftop Macklin Theatre are all real places, though Upson has taken liberties in allowing her fictional characters to be so thoroughly embedded in their history. The character 'Jospehine Tey' occupies an interesting space between fiction and reality, as it was a pseudonym for writer Elizabeth Mackintosh; 'Josephine' never actually existed. I can see how this light fictionalisation gives Upson a degree of freedom to play with Tey's personal history and character.

Angel With Two Faces centres around some darkly disturbing secrets (at one point I thought it was going to go even darker, but it pulled back), but it's worth it for Upson's assured writing and the intelligent, compassionate characters of Josephine and Archie, who share their own complicated history. I think there are now eleven books in the series, all set in my favourite period between the wars, and featuring real and imagined figures from theatre and literature. I will definitely be going back for more.
 

The Chronicles of Narnia and Philosophy

With the rather twee subtitle, The Lion, The Witch and the Worldview, The Chronicles of Narnia and Philosophy (2005) is part of a series that also contains titles about Seinfeld, baseball, The Matrix, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and many more pop culture products (the Woody Allen volume might not have aged too well). It's a collection of essays on various philosophical topics, for example, 'Trusting Lucy: Believing the Incredible,' 'No Longer a Friend: Gender in Narnia' (this came out at about the same time as Neil Gaiman's famous essay, The Problem of Susan), and 'Worthy of a Better God: Religious Diversity and Salvation in The Chronicles of Narnia.' You get the gist.

As with any collection, some of the essays are better than others, and there are quite a few from an openly Christian evangelical standpoint, which is not surprising. It was interesting to see how often the same moments in the Chronicles kept coming up, examined from different angles: when Lucy, but no one else, sees Aslan trying to lead them a particular way, and struggles to convince the others to follow him; similarly, Peter and Susan worrying about Lucy's sanity when she first returns from inside the wardrobe; the dwarfs in The Last Battle who refuse to see that they have entered Paradise; the Lady in The Silver Chair who tries to convince Puddleglum and the others that the underworld is the only reality, and that Narnia above ground is just a dream (it's all in Plato!)

It was interesting to note that there were relatively few references to my favourite of the books, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and many quotes from my least favourite, The Last Battle, which is the most obviously didactic and religious. I have always loved these books, they are part of the fabric of my imagination, and despite their many problematic aspects, I suspect I always will.
 

Return to Sender

First of all, what a beautiful cover! It's a work of art. Hazel Lam was shortlisted for a book design award for this cover and rightly so, it's gorgeous. Lauren Draper's debut novel, Return to Sender, is next on my list of CBCA Notables, and it's a novel with a lot going on: a returning delinquent, a group of friends, a mystery, a simmering romance, historical pain, a secret house in the woods, a cache of mystery letters...

As anyone who has read Dear Swoosie will know, I am a sucker for a cache of mystery letters. In this case, Brodie and her delightfully eccentric grandmother actually live in a post office with a Dead Letter Office attached, so there is plenty of scope for mysteries and possibly even ghosts. But the heart of the story lies in the tight bonds between Brodie, her gay bestie Elliot (and his boyfriend), and heart throb frenemy Levi, all of whom have families with suffering in their pasts.

At times I felt a little unmoored in the landscape of Return to Sender, possibly because it enjoyed a simultaneous Australian and US publication which might have left it hovering between the two countries. The lake and the woods felt more American than Oz, though the wildlife and vegetation was fairly non-specific. Even a reference to the local police department coded US to me. It's all carefully internationally flavoured, nothing to scare the horses (I may have a bias here, as Crow Country was rejected by US publishers as 'too Australian!') Return to Sender apparently began life as a Covid book, and I can't think of a better way of spending lockdown than in spinning this layered, heartfelt novel.
 

Slay

I originally borrowed Brittney Morris's 2019 novel Slay for research into role playing games (more on that later, perhaps), but it actually turned out to be a lively, nuanced story about race and identity. From the first page I was plunged into an unfamiliar Black American culture, which sent me scurrying to the internet for a crash course in terms like twist outs, Hotep and Ebonics.

Our protagonist Kiera has a secret life: after enduring racism in other video games, she has developed and runs a safe online community where thousands of participants duel using cards based on Black culture (skating over how plausible this is for a high school student with a lot of other commitments and a limited budget...) But when one of the players is murdered in real life, (white) people start to ask questions, and Kiera starts questioning herself. Is Slay a safe space, or is it racist and exclusionary? Is it a violent place, or a place of safety and support? Kiera's own vehemently pro-Black boyfriend is against the game, but he doesn't know that Kiera invented it.

Slay is a hugely engaging, pacy novel that confronts important issues in a complex and relatable way; it would make a brilliant class text. Not surprisingly, it's been immensely popular, and despite the necessary suspension of disbelief, I was totally caught up in it.

Miss Caroline Bingley, Private Detective

I've been looking forward to Miss Caroline Bingley, Private Detective since I first saw that it was on the horizon, and it did not disappoint. It made me appreciate the character of Caroline Bingley in a whole new way; I pictured her as Anna Chancellor in BBC Pride and Prejudice throughout: haughty, slightly arrogant perhaps, but intelligent, determined and curious -- all fabulous traits for a private detective.

Gardiner and Kumar have taken Caroline Bingley's personality and gleefully run with it, setting up a plausible mystery involving Georgiana Darcy's missing ladies' maid, the East India Company, smuggling, the slave trade, and (to paraphrase a long ago Dr Who episode) a wonderfully violent butler. There are some gorgeous scenes on the frozen Thames, lively drawing room banter, and thoughtful social commentary, as well as plenty of criminal action. It would have been so difficult to pursue wrongdoers without the benefit of mobile phones (or indeed any phones), cars or a fully functional police force.

I can't wait for further adventures of Miss Caroline Bingley, and I'm sure Jane Austen, though she might have been nonplussed, would thoroughly approve.

A World to Build

The history of Britain immediately after the Second World War is a period I know very little about. David Kynaston has written two books about Austerity Britain: A World to Build covers the years 1945-1948, and its sequel, Smoke in the Valley, takes us from 1948 to 1951.

Kynaston's method is to divide his narrative between the voices of ordinary (and sometimes not ordinary) people, expressed in diaries, Mass Observation interviews, letters and newspapers, and a broader political narrative tracing events in Parliament, policy development, elections and party conferences. I must admit the minutiae of Labour and Conservative party machinations made my eyes glaze over, though the story of the determination to establish a more equitable, yes, socialist, community after the war has its own fascination. As well as setting up the National Health Service, and nationalising many industries, there was an imperative to build new housing -- a struggle with interesting parallels to Australia at the moment.

But I must confess that I found the everyday observations of daily life riveting: complaints about food rationing and other shortages, a terrible freezing winter with low coal supplies, the ubiquity of the black market and 'spivs,' the beginning of ex-colonial immigration with the arrival of the Windrush from Jamaica, moans from the establishment about working class's apparent addiction to cinema and greyhound racing. A more egalitarian future was contemplated with horror by some and satisfaction by others, but it was very difficult to shift class attitudes and prejudice. This was played out clearly in education reforms, which did aspire to offer greater opportunity to bright working class children, but not at the expense of dismantling the public school system -- a bastion of class privilege that Australia seems sadly determined to cement here.

My Family and Other Suspects

Next on my CBCA Notables list was My Family and Other Suspects by Kate Emery. Yet another YA crime novel! This one was a hoot from start to finish: a kind of YA Benjamin Stevenson (Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone), with a lower body count and a dose of teen romance, and knowing asides to the reader. Fourteen year old Ruth is about to go home after a family holiday on her step-grandmother's isolated farm, when a suspicious death forces everyone to stay longer. Ruth and sort-of cousin Dylan set themselves to solve the many mysteries and secrets swirling through the extended family, to a dangerous and satisfying denouement.

Maybe the CBCA judges decided to eliminate all the crime stories from their shortlist, but in my opinion, My Family and Other Suspects should have been on it. It's deft and funny, smart and self-aware (and gets extra points from me for including McCullochs in the story -- one of my own family names). Murder and humour make a winning combination if you can pull it off, and Emery does so brilliantly. A joy to read.
 

Arthur Ransome and Capt Flint's Trunk

For a Swallows and Amazons fan, Christina Hardyment's Arthur Ransome and Capt Flint's Trunk was a pure delight from start to finish. Published in 1984, it came out forty years ago -- less than the 37 years which had passed between the publication of the final S&A book in 1947 and this labour of love.

Hardyment visits the locations of all the S&A novels and hunts for real life parallels in geography and characters. The lake of the first adventures is a combination of Coniston and Windemere, but most of the terrain seems faithfully copied from one or the other (with the exception of the Swallowdale valley, which she leaves for future readers to pin down). She is greatly aided by the contents of Ransome's trunk, now in an archive, which contains notes, drawings, maps and unpublished material, much of which is shared here.

Hardyment was also able to interview many of the children (now adults) who inspired the characters, like the Altounyan family (including the real life Titty and Brigit!) and gather their recollections of Ransome. Most of these people are sadly dead now, so it's wonderful that Hardyment took the opportunity when it was available. She explores some of the waterways by windsurfing -- much easier for a solo sailor! -- and includes many photographs of Ransome, his boats and various children posing for the book illustrations.

One marvellous inclusion is a draft first chapter for Peter Duck, showing Captain Flint and the S&As beginning to invent the story of Peter Duck, which was eventually published without this framing device, but showing how different the final book might have been.

Arthur Ransome and Capt Flint's Trunk is the kind of treasure I scour Brotherhood Books for -- a delicious treat and one I will definitely devour again.
 

Help Yourself

How many stories do you need to make a collection? In the case of Curtis Sittenfeld's Help Yourself, it's THREE. Not complaining about the quality, but a volume of well under a hundred pages has trouble qualifying as a book, in my opinion! This is the problem with buying sight unseen from Brotherhood Books -- of course I don't take note of the number of pages when I'm eagerly clicking Add to Basket.  

Having said that, the stories themselves are excellent: wry, self-aware, slightly painful. In White Women LOL, a middle class woman makes some ill-judged remarks at a bar, and pays the price in community  and self-judgment; Creative Differences ponders the trade-offs between commercialism, art, exposure and money. Show Don't Tell deliciously returns to one of Sittenfeld's favourite arenas, the world of students, this time creative writing students, but enlarges the horizon with the inclusion of a difficult housemate.

I devoured these stories in a single greedy gulp, but they've just left me hungry for more.

 

A Language of Limbs

I heard Dylin Hardcastle's recent novel, A Language of Limbs, recommended on the ABC Book Shelf program. It's a kind of sliding doors story. Two young girls, growing up in regional NSW in the 1970s, choose different life paths. In 'limb one,' she acts on her lesbian desires, is thrown out of home, makes her way to Sydney and finds a new community, under siege from the law and social opprobrium and soon to be ravaged by AIDS, but also joyful, loving and supportive. In 'limb two,' she suppresses her illicit feelings and follows a more conventional journey, through university and marriage, but still facing personal tragedy.

For quite a while I thought these two characters might be alternate universe versions of each other, their experiences eerily echoing or brushing up against each other; but they do come together at the very end. There was a bit more poetry than I'm really comfortable with (I'm a bit allergic to poetry), but this is a beautifully written and constructed novel that also provides an overview of queer history in the 20th century, quite a bit of which I remember living through. There's probably more sex in it than I'm really comfortable with, too, but each to their own! A Language of Limbs is a wonderful, deeply emotional, moving and passionate novel.
 

Stay Well Soon

By chance, I read Emily Gale's comments on Penny Tangey's Stay Well Soon just as I was in the middle of reading it. Gale was writing about funny books, and complained that no one would ever guess that Stay Well Soon is a funny book by looking at the 'sad girl on the cover.' She pointed out that Stay Well Soon is a sad book, too, and it is -- it's a book about sibling illness, cancer, death and dying -- but seen through the eyes of our narrator, eleven year old Stevie, it's also very droll and delightful to read.

Stevie is a great protagonist. She's having friendship problems, and all she wants from life is a pony. She fantasises about riding her dream horse, Atta Girl, along beaches and through the desert, communicating telepathically. 'She'll let me know when the campfire is going out.' But when her brother gets sick, suddenly everything revolves around Ryan and his hospital treatments. Very plausibly, Stevie tries to push away her knowledge about what this might mean, but reality intrudes.

I loved Stevie, her friendship with Lara from the hospital, her family, her harassed Mum, who we can see is barely holding on, 'Dad Ben,' new friend Morgan, teacher Mr Parks. There are lots of funny schoolyard scenes, like when the group play Kidnappers and even more when they're playing Royal Family. I absolutely loved Stay Well Soon and Tangey strikes the perfect balance between poignant and snort-giggle.
 

The Pangs of Love

I'd forgotten how much I love Jane Gardam's writing, though I was very sad to hear of her death just a couple of months ago. I'd previously read some (but not all) of the short stories in 1983's The Pangs of Love in a big fat story collection I acquired years ago, but enough time had passed that I was able to enjoy them freshly.

The collection opens with The First Adam, a story from the point of view of a familiar Gardam type, an expatriate engineer who has lived abroad for years without compromising his essentially English outlook. He feels sorry for an older woman by the pool, invites her to a drink in his room, but doesn't try to seduce her, ultimately more absorbed in his work. Fittingly, the collection ends with The Last Adam, told from the woman's point of view -- and she actually has a more interesting backstory than the bloke, and she in turn feels sorry for him, and calls him 'the poor old man.' The title story, a rewrite of the tale of the Little Mermaid, was probably my least favourite.

Many of these stories centre around a disconnection between appearance and reality, between perception and truth, image and fact. I could understand criticism of Gardam for her narrow English, middle class lens and perhaps for exoticising some of her settings: India, Hong Kong, Malta, Italy, are always seen through colonial eyes. But I respect the honesty of that; and I can forgive a lot for the sharpness of her writing and the poignancy of her characters.